Two sets of studies are proposed which are directed to the continuing investigation of the cognitive structures used by parents and other socializers in organizing and interpreting the behavior stream of the child. Research on socialization has generally neglected to consider this important set of variables in the parent-child interaction sequence. The first study series will be concerned with discovering the underlying categories and/or dimensions used by mothers and fathers in assigning personality traits to boys and girls between the ages of 6 and 11 years. Parents who participate must all have a child of each sex within the prescribed age period and will be recruited from five different cultural groups. "Naturalistic" vocabularies of traits will be elicited from each group of parents through unstructured interviews and reduced to core vocabularies to describe their own children. The resulting data will be subjected to multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering analyses. The validity of the categorical and dimensional structures emerging from this analysis will be tested by having another set of parents rate the items on the respective dimensions and applying multiple regression techniques to the results. To test the effect of role relationship on the structuring, parents will be asked to describe a child not their own but of the same age and sex. A sample of teachers will also be used to describe boys and girls of the same age range. In the second study series, parents and teachers will be asked to describe in various ways filmed sequences of children interacting in a naturalistic setting. An effort will be made to include "uni-sex" children in the sequences. Analyses of sequencing, labeling, categorizing, etc. are projected for mothers and fathers viewing children who are alternately labeled boys and girls.